By Alison Knezevich
Charleston Gazette (West Virginia)
Copyright 2007 Charleston Newspapers
HURRICANE, W.Va. — Stefanie Reger held her injured son as she watched the ambulance race past her street. The child’s life was in danger, but paramedics couldn’t find her address.
A dresser fell on the 3-year-old on the morning of March 28. He wasn’t breathing when she found him. He had no heartbeat. Reger administered CPR and called 911.
But her street sign in a Hurricane subdivision called Woodridge Estates was posted on the wrong side of the street, leading the ambulance to take a wrong turn. Paramedics called her back several times to get more directions.
“I was standing in the front yard with my son in my arms,” she said. “I watched the ambulance go right past my street.”
The confusion cost the ambulance an extra five to seven minutes, said Putnam emergency services Director Frank Chapman.
The toddler sustained brain injuries and is now at a hospital in Morgantown for rehabilitation. Reger, who had moved here from Washington, D.C., three weeks before the accident, doesn’t blame the paramedics. “I think they were doing the best they could,” she said.
In Putnam County — one of the state’s fastest-growing areas, where 13 new subdivisions were approved last year — housing developers must indicate where street signs will be posted before their subdivisions are approved, said county planning Director Sandy Mellert.
But once a subdivision is built, the planning office has no authority to enforce that signs are in the right spot, Mellert said. That’s because it was the county commission that passed a 2003 ordinance on street signs, meaning enforcement is the county’s responsibility.
If another department, such as emergency services or the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, tells county planning officials that a development has safety issues, then the planning office can stop issuing the developer building permits, she said.
The county has approved four new subdivisions so far this year. County Administrator Brian Donat said in light of the growth, officials might need to be more aware of street signs’ placement and readability.
However, the county has no plans to change procedures about street signs.
“You assume a developer is going to put a sign in the right place,” said county commission President Joe Haynes. “I don’t know you police something like that.”
In the case of Woodridge Estates, where houses are still being built, planning officials inspected the subdivision in July 2005 and told the developer the street sign was not where the plan indicated it would be. Eight days later, an engineer for the developer certified that the sign was moved.
The developer, Dorsel Hodges, said he felt bad about what happened but he thought engineers had placed the sign where his plan showed it would be. “That’s where they said to set it to start with,” he said.
He said he is still unsure about where the county wants the sign to be posted. “I can’t tell you,” he said.
Mellert, Chapman and Donat all said that the sign is now in the correct place. It was moved several days after the dresser accident.
When 911 gets calls from houses built after 2002, dispatchers cannot use an enhanced data system called computer-aided dispatch, which gives driving directions and a photograph of the home, Chapman said. That information did not pop up in Reger’s case because the house is new, so the system didn’t have a picture of it.
(Chapman said people should be assured, however, that dispatchers can get the location of a house if it has a phone line, no matter when the house was built.)
Doctors told Reger it’s hard to tell if the ambulance’s delayed response has affected her child’s health. The important thing was that she started her son’s heartbeat and his lungs through CPR.
“It hurts too much to think, ‘What if?’” she said. “I’m thankful he’s alive.”
Putnam County commissioners took up street sign readability at their weekly meeting last Tuesday, but Donat said that was a separate issue unrelated to what happened at Woodridge Estates. In a letter dated one day after the dresser accident, the county planning office informed the developer of an under-construction Scott Depot subdivision off Teays Valley Road that a street sign there did not comply with the 2003 county ordinance.
The letter said emergency vehicles wouldn’t be able to identify the sign, which is beige with black, cursive letters. The planning office said they would not grant the company, Steorts Homebuilders, any more building permits until it replaced the sign.
The developer of the Scott Depot subdivision, Mike Steorts, had requested a variance for the ordinance. He had already bought similar signs for the rest of the subdivision and maintains that they are readable and comply with county rules. He said the first phase of his subdivision had been approved with the sign in place. The planning office has since told his lawyer that he can continue building, he said.
The ordinance’s language is somewhat vague because it uses the words “should” instead of “must.” For example, it says, “The letters and backgrounds should be of contrasting colors and should have white letters and border on a green background.”
The emergency services department can notify the county that a street sign’s lettering may be unclear, but is not required to regularly inspect signs, Chapman said.
He said the discussion last Tuesday was because a firefighter who passed by Steorts’ subdivision noticed the sign and told him it was hard to read.
“It’s not directly related to [the accident at Woodridge Estates],” Chapman said.
For now, Stefanie Reger wants to tell parents three things: Know CPR. Anchor your furniture to the wall if your children are young. And make sure your street has proper signs.